'House of Cards' Season 4 review round-up: What to expect from Frank and Claire Underwood?

President Underwood will be more ruthless than ever.

March 2, 2016 16:47 IST

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Netflix's political thriller "House of Cards" Season 4 will premiere on Friday, March 4, and let fans discover the future of Claire (Robin Wright) and Frank's (Kevin Spacey) marriage. While the producers of the show have been tight-lipped about the plot, reviews of Season 4 indicate that President Underwood will stop at nothing to retain his power.

Claire is as bad a person as Frank, but she's not as good at the game, so there's less pleasure in watching Wright, whose greatest achievement in the past two seasons has been her admirable maturation as a director. Maybe that's what Kinnaman's character will eventually provide, either a worthy adversary or a rising protagonist? It doesn't matter whether or not Frank returns to talking to viewers, but he badly needs something worth talking about.

With last year's Season 3 of now-departed showrunner Beau Willimon's series planting strategic seeds and showing Spacey's now-President Frank Underwood no longer so easily dispensing or out-maneuvering his foes, Season 4 finds the vulnerable incumbent running for a re-election and at a risk of losing it all. As the strain and pressure intensifies domestically and internationally, HoC S4 veers toward the soap, but with fine-tuned brinkmanship pulls itself back to a steely spine of a solid drama.

But now that departed showrunner Beau Willimon has found a way of putting Underwood on the back foot again, House of Cards has regained its mojo. Spacey twinkles with vehemence as he ratchets up his portrayal of Frank as villainous force of nature; Wright has never been better as burningly ambitious ice queen Claire, who has unearthed a useful foil in ruthless strategist Leann Harvey (played by the star of the 1996 horror classic Scream, Neve Campbell).

The new season establishes some background on who Claire Underwood is, but somehow it doesn't add up to a clearer sense of her. Fans of Wright's steely intensity will have much to enjoy, but the central mystery of who she is remains frustratingly vague, even with a little more information.

At this point, we know who Frank is. But as the show has moved him into greater and greater positions of power, it had to invent challenges for him to struggle against, because the whole point of his character is endless ambition. To what end? What has Frank ever even wanted to do with the presidency? He's there now, but there's so little to be done with a Frank Underwood presidency that he spends the whole time drawn into petty conflicts, with old enemies nipping at his heels.